Daughter of Darkness

by Ed Gorman

  "I just don't see how Quinlan could have done all this," Tom Stafford said, "when he hasn't seen her in at least two years."

  Molly Stafford nodded. She had the same question.

  "Maybe he has been seeing her," Ted said.

  Coffey shook his head. "I don't think he's needed to see her. Because she's been seeing someone else."

  "Who?" Stafford snapped.

  "Priscilla Bowman," Coffey said.

  "Her psychiatrist?" Molly Stafford said. "That's impossible. Priscilla is almost like part of the family. She's seen ail of us through some pretty bad times."

  "I don't have any doubt about that," Coffey said. "She's a good psychiatrist. One of the best in the city. She's also still in love with Quinlan and helping him with Jenny. Together, they've programmed Jenny into developing a second personality that they can dictate to."

  "But Jenny's never said anything about Priscilla acting strangely or anything," Molly said.

  "She frequently puts Jenny into a hypnotic state doesn't she?" Coffey said.

  "Yes, but that's just part of her technique," Stafford said.

  "When Jenny is suggestible like that, in a kind of trance," Coffey said, "that'd be a perfect time to manipulate her the way they want to, I'd say."

  "These are just accusations," Ted said. "I mean, no offense, but where do you get the qualifications to be talking about any of this? What do you do for a living, anyway?"

  Pulling rank, Coffey thought. When you don't want to believe someone, you find a way to belittle them. Put them so far below your station that you don't have to take them seriously.

  "I drive a cab and I write mystery novels on the side," Coffey said quietly. "And I used to be a cop."

  "Ever had any formal training in psychology?"

  "No."

  "Ever had any formal training in drug use or drug therapy?"

  "No."

  "But," Hannigan said, "you're standing here lecturing us."

  "I'm repeating things I've read and heard and learned, Mr. Hannigan," Coffey said. "Nothing more, nothing less."

  "It's possible that Jenny just had some kind of breakdown, isn't it?" he questioned. "And that the breakdown has nothing to do with hypnosis or drugs?"

  "It's possible, yes."

  "I resent that, Hannigan," Stafford snapped. "You're saying you actually believe that Jenny committed these murders?"

  Ted sighed. The strain between the two men was easy to see, Hannigan, the rumpled but still-dashing artist, Stafford, the military-precise businessman. From time to time. Molly Stafford looked back and forth at them, as if she was trying to make some decision. They were both formidable men and it couldn't be much fun to get caught in the crossfire of their egos.

  "I'm not saying anything about the murders, Tom," Hannigan snapped back. "I'm simply saying that Jenny may simply have had a breakdown. I spent a good share of the afternoon with her. I've never seen her this fragile. She looked extremely stressed." He paused. "She looked like she did the day she went into the hospital."

  "She was getting better, Ted," Molly said. "She really was. Until this came up-this, these murders."

  "She didn't commit them," Stafford said angrily. "We're all sitting around here and that's what's in the air. That she killed these men. But that's not true. It's impossible." He was glaring at all three of them now, his hand wrapped so tightly around his whiskey glass that his knuckles were white.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Quinlan, who had once said, in his role as divine father figure for rich folks, "Guns shouldn't be a last resort. They shouldn't be any resort at all," Quinlan was packing a .45. Apparently, God had sent him a memo about guns being a last resort.

  It hadn't taken long to figure out what Gretchen and Jenny were up to. Work their way through to the tunnel, out here to this grassy area, then hurry on down to the river. It was shallow and narrow at this point. They could easily swim across. There was a park area over there, and a pay phone.

  Even in the heavy dusk, Quinlan could see exactly where the tunnel came out high on the face of a red clay cliff, hidden behind a stand of scrub pines.

  Quinlan was alone because he didn't want any of the others to know where it came out. True, Barcroft and three of the others had seen the door that led to the tunnel, but they didn't know what was behind the door. This was an escape route Quinlan didn't want to share with anybody. Only a phantom like Gretchen could have revealed his secret.

  Quinlan heard a sharp noise in the bush. He swung around, his .45 ready to fire.

  A brown-and-white dog, that looked like a mutt with beagle blood in it, ran past him about four feet away. Quinlan followed the animal with his weapon. He'd never killed anything, and he wondered what the experience was like. Probably let him down; most experiences did. He'd experimented with everything at one point or another in his life-virtually every kind of drug, every kind of sex, every kind of mind game-but they all let him down in the end. He was stuck inside his own ego and couldn't get out and he knew it. Masturbation was still a better orgasm than any kind of humping; and controlling a person was far superior to any kind of friendship with that person. That was why Jenny had meant so much to him. Somehow, she'd made him respond differently. He had genuinely pursued her. Maybe there was something in her particular kind of pain that attracted him. Pain was sometimes the most interesting part of a person. And yet with Jenny the pain was balanced by an innocence that he found profoundly sexual. That she wouldn't sleep with him just made her all the more desirable. Yet, in the end, he knew there was no way he could ever have her. While she'd been attracted to him from afar, seeing him as an insatiable predator changed her mind about him. She was gone from him now, gone forever, and the only thing he could do now-the only kind of communication left to them-was for him to destroy her.

  He looked back at the tunnel exit. Something there had just caught his attention. But in the dusk, it was hard to tell. Something he'd only imagined-or something he'd really seen?

  He moved up closer, raising the aim of the gun as well.

  At first, there was nothing, just the fuzzy gray half-light of dusk. Then-something.

  A bald head stuck through the tunnel opening. Peered around. Like a nervous bird.

  The head remained there for a couple of minutes, checking out everything spread before it.

  Quinlan stayed in the shadow of a scrub pine. The ground here was sweet with the scent of pine cones and the heavy boughs promised comforting protection against the night winds. He wondered idly, as he watched Gretchen emerge like a struggling infant from the birth canal, what it would be like to sleep out under the stars the way the cowboys once had. He had all this money, all this power, and yet there was so much he hadn't gotten around to in his life.

  When Gretchen had wriggled halfway out of the small tunnel opening, she made the mistake of trying to dive out the rest of the way. It didn't work. She came out about three-fourths of the way and just hung there, about four feet off the clay ground below, a trapeze artist awkwardly caught on her swing.

  Quinlan made his move, came out of the shadows, started walking over to the clay cliff.

  "Need some help?" he said.

  "You bastard," Gretchen snapped.

  He smiled and walked over to her, gallantly putting out his hand. "You've kept me waiting."

  "You bastard."

  "I believe you just said that, Gretchen."

  "You don't give a damn about me at all, do you?"

  She was still hanging from the tunnel exit. "Let me help you down."

  "I don't need your help."

  Then he said, "Where's Jenny?"

  "Jenny? She was way ahead of me."

  "What?"

  "She was way ahead of me in the tunnel. She must've gotten away."

  He reached up and grabbed one of her shoulders and yanked her entire body free of the tunnel exit. She landed facedown on the ground, landed pretty hard, in fact. Not that he cared.

  He grabbed the other shoulder and
yanked her around to face him. "Now tell me the truth."

  "I am telling you the truth."

  "You little bitch," he said, and slapped her hard. "Now where's Jenny?"

  Gretchen started crying. "We went into that little room. You know the one I mean. She wanted to go first from there, she said. She said that we'd have a better chance if we came out of the tunnel one at a time. She said to give her a fifteen-minute head start. That's what I did. And that's the last I've seen of her."

  He wanted to take the .45 and kill her with it. Not with bullets. With the butt and the barrel. Smash every delicate bone in her delicate face. And then crush a few ribs hard enough that blood was boiling up out of her mouth. Beating someone to death would give him far more tactile-and spiritual-satisfaction than would simply shooting somebody.

  "So you're telling me she's gone?"

  "As far as I know."

  "Did she tell you where she was going?"

  "No; she isn't much of a talker. At least, she wasn't with me."

  Quinlan turned away and walked back toward the river. The streaked dusk sky was salmon and blue and mauve now. The moon was little more than an outline. In the distance, you could hear the cars and trucks on the Interstate. Closer by, it was owls and nightbirds.

  "It's pretty, isn't it?" Gretchen said when she came down the slanting grassy terrain to stand next to him. "The river."

  "At night it is," he said. "You don't see all the pollution."

  Gretchen giggled. "You're so cynical. But I s'pose that's part of your wisdom." Then, "You know why I helped her?"

  He just felt very tired. "I don't care why you helped her."

  "For us."

  "That's nice."

  "Aren't you curious. Me saying 'for us?' "

  "No."

  "I love you, Quinlan. Can't you understand that. The other people all want something from you. I don't. I just want to be around you. I'd stay over in the corner and never say a word unless you wanted me to."

  There had been a time in college-his last Romantic period-when a moment like this would have been as lovely and elegant as a sentence by his favorite writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

  And here he was all these years later, with an undeniably attractive woman-even with her head shaved, Gretchen was beautiful-and the night was as wonderfully sad as the saddest song on the jukebox, that song that trails you all the way home and is still in your head when you awaken next morning, and yet he didn't give a damn at all. Would, in fact, kill this bitch if he thought it wouldn't create more problems than it solved. He wanted Jenny, and no one else. He'd just realized that all over again, and it was a terrible thing to realize.

  Gretchen had slipped her arm through his, as they stood here looking down at this small Midwestern river that moved so slowly through the prairie night.

  "I can make you happy, Quinlan," she said softly. "I really can."

  And for a moment there-just a moment-he felt that, yes, it was true, she could make him happy. That the little-girl, totally-accepting way she loved him was just what he needed. A handmaiden, a sister, a mother, she would be all these things, and when he was lonely and depressed in the middle of the night, she would hold him and rock him as if he were her child, and she would give food when he needed it and sex when he needed it and companionship and solitude when he needed it.

  And for a moment there-just a moment-he felt the swooning heady rush of escaping his ego, of turning himself over to someone else, "O Sisters, rock me on the waters and cool my fevered brow," as in the old Jackson Browne song, and, yes! It was so right! Gretchen was so right! And why hadn't he seen this earlier how right she was! And then…

  And then the moment was gone, a firefly in a vast summer night. And Gretchen sensed it, too, the moment lost, because she clung to him as if he were drowning, holding him tight to her so that she could save him.

  "I felt it, Quinlan," Gretchen said. "I felt what you were feeling. I really did. It was like telepathy, Quinlan. It really was."

  But he took his arm from hers and walked along to the river by himself and looked downstream at the twisted turn of the river. A terrible emptiness filled him, a void of distance and melancholy, and he saw on the moon-washed river the outline of Jenny's face. And then even that was gone.

  He reached in his back pocket and whipped out his cell phone. He punched several numbers quickly and said, "We've got a problem. She's gone."

  He clicked off.

  By the time he had replaced the cell phone in his back pocket, Gretchen was there. She grabbed the .45 before he could stop her-biting his hand until he gave it up. Then she knelt before him and undid his zipper. Holding the .45 on him all the while.

  All the time it was going on, he stared up at the moon and stars. You would think that even a minor god like himself would find solace in the moon and stars. And yet he didn't. Not at all.

  When she was done, he helped Gretchen to her feet, and she wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and together they walked back to the compound.

  ***

  She couldn't really trust Gretchen. That was the trouble.

  True, Gretchen had walked away with Quinlan. But what if it was a trap? What if Quinlan was hiding just off to the side? Maybe Gretchen had reasoned that the only final way to deal with Jenny was to see that she was killed.

  Jenny waited a few minutes, listened to the night right outside the tunnel exit, the slow-moving river, a nearby dog barking out of what sounded like boredom, and the wind in the scrub pines, the boughs bending with audible elegance. She was close enough to the end of the tunnel so that her claustrophobia wasn't so bad. She could think clearly now, without the frenzied need for escape.

  It would all be over soon, and for the first time, she felt an almost joyous optimism. Quinlan was behind the murders, and the police would be able to understand that now. He had manipulated her. His long reach had extended from the time that she'd lived at the compound till the present time. But that long reach had now been stretched to its limit.

  She listened to the falling darkness. Nothing untoward that she could hear. Maybe Gretchen really had kept her word to simply tell Quinlan that Jenny had already escaped, and to then lead Quinlan back to the hospital where, according to Gretchen's shabby fantasy, Quinlan would now be hers.

  Now. Time to go. She'd find out soon enough if Gretchen had kept her word. If she hadn't, Quinlan would be standing out there with his gun.

  She started to crawl to the edge of the tunnel. She didn't want to dangle from the edge the way Gretchen had, so she simply let herself drop head first to the ground. She had no trouble breaking her fall or getting to her feet.

  When she looked around at the long grasses and the deep woods, it was hard to imagine that she was this close to the city. Commune land really did have the feel of a bucolic retreat.

  The water would be cold. She had already steeled herself to that. She was a competent swimmer, no more, no less, and a reasonably good sport when it came to enduring unpleasanties. Jumping into the water this late at night, especially a river whose upstream tributaries were virtual toxic waste dumps, would put her endurance quotient to a severe test.

  Under the spanning stars, in a darkness sweet with the smell of burning autumn leaves and a saucy chill nip of true fall on the air, she stood on the river bank, slipping off her small black heels. She knew that her Levis would be heavy in the water, but she also knew that she would freeze without them. And she'd certainly need them when she swam to shore somewhere downstream.

  And that was when he said, "You look beautiful tonight, Jenny. But then you always do."

  Quinlan had always been good at sneaking up on her. He was especially good when Jenny was preoccupied with getting her shoes off, and getting ready for the water.

  He walked up and stood next to her now. "Smells good tonight. Can't smell all the pig shit from that hog farm."

  The hospital was downwind from a nearby hog farm. The farm stench could get overwhelming sometimes. The last courtroom g
o-round, the judge had ordered the farm to install new equipment that would cut down on the smell considerably. Quinlan's first reaction was that the farm had gotten to the judge-paid him off or blackmailed him-and here was the judge ordering them to put a band-aid on a cancer. One thing was for sure, the stench reminded the commune people of how glad they were to be vegetarians.

  He took her arm. "I could have my plane ready to go in two hours. We could be in Europe by tomorrow morning. They'd never find us."

  She watched him for a time, amazed as always at the depth of his feeling for her-and yet frightened that he knew so little of the real Jenny. He'd concocted this princess fantasy about her-with himself as the white knight-and no matter what she did to convince him otherwise, she persisted as perfect in his mind. Her third or fourth week at the commune, when she was so desperate to be saved-she'd seen that with Quinlan it was the other way round-she was saving him. She represented something to him, some unfathomable Woman symbol that he felt could redeem him somehow. And when he learned that she wouldn't sleep with him, learned that she would never be his… he decided to destroy her by framing her for two murders.

  He turned to take her in his arms.

  "You're all that matters to me," he said.

  "Is that why you wanted to send me to prison? Because I 'matter' to you so much?"

  "We can get away, Jenny," he said. The desperation she always inspired in him was in his voice once again. "Nobody will ever be able to find us. I have plenty of assets. We can have a wonderful life together."